How To Wire A Light Switch - EASY Single Pole Switch STEP BY STEP Wiring Tutorial

in this video i'm going to show you how to wire the single pole switch to this switch box you see here beside me and i'm also going to show you how to wire two switches in a double gang box and if you're new this channel my name is josh this channel is all about building your own house saving ton of money so be sure to subscribe ring that bell so you get a notification every time i release a new video and hammer that like button for me that's all i ask in return for making this video so we're not going to waste a bunch of time today so let's get started this is the double gang box where we're going to be wiring the two switches to after we do the single gang box and for full disclosure i am not a licensed electrician i have wired my own houses and they all have passed inspection but all building codes are different in different areas so check your local building codes before doing your own electrical work and see if it's even possible to do your own electrical work in your area all right let's get started on that light switch before i start stripping the wire i wanted to show you that there are different manufacturers of switches so as you can see these two look very similar but they're different manufacturers but they function the same both of these have gold screws on one side that are going to be for your hot which is the black wire to hook to and you're going to have a green screw for your grounds to hook to and here's the green screw here for the ground to hook to and they both have as you can see have screws in the tops and bottoms here that screw into the switch box to secure it into place and i wanted to show you something very interesting that a lot of people probably don't know if you look close here if you see this indention and this length that is a strip gauge that shows you the length in which you need to strip the wires to wrap around these screws comfortably and this one has a strip gauge too it's right there so check your switch to see if your strip gauge is on there or not and it should be this actually came from home depot i believe and this one came from lowe's and i'll put a link to switches in my amazon store if you want to go through amazon to get these switches before you do any electrical work on a circuit be sure to come over to the panel box open it up locate that circuit and kick that breaker off so that way there's no power going to that circuit all right let's get back to wiring that light switch in this case we got two 12 two wires coming into the switch box this one is the power this one is going up to the light so the first thing we need to do is strip the insulation and casing off these wires so to do that i just take a utility knife but they do make romex wire strippers and i'll put a link to those in my amazon store if you would rather purchase those if you're going to be doing your own project to strip your wires but in this case i've been doing this for most of my career and the utility knife works fine you just got to go across the jacket really lightly just enough to score it and then peel back the casing and get the paper and the plastic off the wire and just be sure to cut away from the wire and not towards the wire if you're going to be using the utility knife method what we got here are two neutrals we got two blacks and we got two grounds so what we need to do first is get these grounds down and we're going to tie these grounds together this is what's called a crimp sleeve and it's really easy to use all you got to do is slide it over both your ground wires at the same time these bare coppers or your ground then all you got to do is take a pair of pliers crimp that sleeve really tight and twist the wires together like this and you don't want to tighten it so tight to where it breaks the wires but just to always twist together very nicely and then separate the wire a little bit and then snip this back about a quarter inch from the sleeve and then bend it over and then crimp that together tight and that's all there is to addressing your ground wires and now we need to strip the insulation off these wires i'm going to use these wire strippers for that and all you got to do to use these is place this in the gauge in which is indicated on the wire stripper and according to that light switch it looks like it's about 5 8 so i'm just going to guesstimate about 5 8 of an inch it doesn't have to be perfect and so anywhere from 5 8 to a half inch look to be about correct so now all we need to do is take a pair of needle nose pliers grip the end of the wire that stripped and then twist it into a hook a nice sharp hook now do that to the other black wire so you only do this to the black wires and the ground wire just give them a nice hook and then we're going to put these kind of to the side now with these two neutral wires i'm just going to twist these together first i'm just going to take my pliers and just kind of give them a good twist together something about like that and then i'm going to take this wire nut one of these this can hold up to 3 12 wires so two should be fine and then we're going to go ahead and wire nut the neutrals together and always keep twisting until it's relatively hard to twist anymore and then twist the wires themselves together a little bit and then we're going to go ahead and just stuff those back in the box because we are done with the white wires now i'm going to go ahead and install the wires onto the switch so if we take a look here the word on and the word off is upright that's how i can easily tell if the switch is upright or upside down and it really doesn't matter it'll still function fine but just for cosmetic purposes it's always nice to be able to read your writing on your items so if we take a look at this ground screw we're going to install that first it turns clockwise to tighten so we want to make sure the hook goes around the ground screw starting from this side and looping around so we'll go ahead and take this ground slide it over that screw hold it tight up against the device and tighten it down nicely and like all the wires going on to the switch you need to make sure they're torqued down really tight now let's address the black wire these two black wires go to these screws here this gold screw and this gold screw and it doesn't matter if you put this black wire on this one or this one either or is fine so we'll go ahead and start at the top and work down just hook it around and make sure it's on snug and then tighten down the screw and it's very very very important to tighten your screws down really tight and the reason why that is you don't want these loose and arcing because that can cause a fire actually if it is not tight enough and is loose so if you just put this on here and didn't tighten it down it's loose and that could arc can cause a fire so you don't want that so again make sure they're on real tight and then tighten down your screw really really snug and always tighten it down then i'll go back and double check to make sure they're tight so you don't want to forget that step so those are nice and snug and i just wanted to point out to you as you can see here there's hardly any insulation that's uh from this screw so as you can see the insulation is almost right up to it that means it is stripped properly so using the strip gauge on the back that was right here let me know how much to take off so that looks really good just wanted to point that out to you so now i'm going to try to fold these wires back in the box really neatly and sometimes depending on if it's cold or hot out is how easy these wires fold so we're just going to try to aim to get the screw into this hole that's in the top and bottom of the switch box and fyi i'm going to have drywall installed yet so i'm just going to put this on here for demonstration purposes then take it off before i install drywall but i just want to show you guys how this works just line it up into the hole take your screwdriver go ahead and tighten that down some then come down here do the same thing tighten this down some and like i said with the drywall on these tabs are going to catch the drywall so with the drywall one is probably all it's going to be installed right there so it's going to look something like that and these are going to catch it but for demonstration purposes again i'm just going to tighten this down some that is all there is to installing a single switch now let's go install two switches in one box this which box was roughed in from this video in the top right hand corner of the screen and how to wire a room go check out the video if you want to know how to rough wire a room like this all right so the first thing i'm going to do is strip all the casing off these wires just like i did on the other switch box first thing we're going to do is address these ground wires so we're going to do it similar to how we did the last one but there's a little different thing we got to do when there's two switches and i'll show you after i get these crimped together so we're going to slide that up crimp this crimp sleeve down really tight and now we just twist them all together like so again not super hard but snug okay and now we need to have two wires for two switches so we just gotta snip one of these back so we'll do it to this one it doesn't matter which one you do it to then we're gonna crimp that over gives us a nice neat look now i'm going to take this ground and shove it back into the box get it kind of out of the way and now we're going to address all of these wires so we know we need to keep our blacks and the red up out of the way now we got to tie all these neutrals together so i'm just going to go ahead and trim these all to the same length so come towards the end here about like that so that way they're all about the same distance away from each other then we're going to strip these back about a half inch something like this half inch to 5 8 now i'm just going to twist these together first so just hold them all together and then just give them a good twist now i'm going to use a red wire nut this time since it has some more volume but the yellow wire nut would still be fine but this is a little more comfortable fit twist all these together and then i twist it a little more and now we're going to go ahead and push this one back in the box so that it's out of the way so if we take a look here if we look back in here this is a 12 3 wire that's going up to the ceiling fan light combo so we're going to push this one out of the way and we could have kept the label when we stripped the wire so we could have kept them organized but um it's okay it's pretty simple to see which ones which so this is a power coming in and this is a power continued so these need tied together and have two pigtails coming off of that if you watch my how to wire a panel box video you remember right that there's a bunch of these black wires we cut out of there because of the excess length so i just got two pieces that are about eight inches long and these are going to be for our pigtails off these hot wires so in order to do that it's similar to how we did the neutrals i'm just going to trim them to about the same length it just makes it easier to tie them together when you do this but make sure there's plenty of wire coming out of the box yet you don't trim these back if they're already too short and now what we've got to do is go ahead and strip 5 8 or so off each side of these pigtails and now what i do i go ahead and just bend these wires that are like that just kind of l-shaped almost so that way i can put all these together and get ready to twist these together just like we did the neutrals then take the red wire nut and twist all those together so what we have now is two hot wires coming off that single power that came into this box and it continues to power the outlets so make sure this is on really tight very very important all right i'm just going to give that a nice little twist right like that and now i'm going to go ahead and push this back into the box all right so we know these are our powers and these go out to our fan and our light so the red we're just going to say is our light and the black will say to our fan and these are the powers to power each one of those so now we must strip the fan and the light and this is the same length as the gauge on this light switch that we strip off so right like that and now we prepare these all of these like we did all the other light switch wires from the other box so we're going to go ahead and grip the end put a nice u okay or hook people call it u shaped hook shaped j shaped whatever as long as it hooks and then do the same to the grounds right like that all right here are the switches this is that one that's different than this one so we're going to go ahead and install them both so you see how they are installed so here is our hot wires so we just install these as if we installed the other switch the same way if we tighten this way we want to bring the wire in from the bottom and loop around like this so we're going to go ahead either one of these screws like said is fine so put it on tight like that and then take your screwdriver and then tighten it up like i did in the other on the other switch all right so we got a power for that switch so we'll go ahead and hook the ground up to it now we pick either the red or the black whichever switch we want to control what so let's just do the black for now this will be operating the fan so to speak which it really won't matter because what how we wire it up in the fan light combo is what determines if the red or black is for whichever but typically i'll wire the fan and then do the switches afterwards okay so there's one let me just kind of put that out of the way and then the second switch will do the same thing all right so i'm not going to tighten these up and put them into the switch boxes i'll just have to take them off for drywall i just want to show you how these go i'm going to take the camera down up close just so you can see the wiring inside to understand how this all works all right let's just go over this switch first so as you can see this black wire right here goes down around and goes up to that 12 3 wire and that three wire goes up to the fan light combo and then the power is coming from the pigtailed power that we got right there so power's coming in and then off and on so it just bridges together this wire more or less inside this switch then that powers the light or fan whichever one we picked to come off that 12-3 wire if we come over here the ground's hooked to this switch here just as if it's hooked to that switch but we can see the power is coming out of this pigtail over to this switch bridge together by this switch then the red is going right up to the ceiling fan combo with that 12 3 wire so that's how you have a fan light combo on two different switches here and yeah so i feel like i feel like that'll be helpful because i did two rooms on my channel so far with this type of setup and just so you understand where everything's pigtailed here together the wire that's going out the back right down this wall is going to power the receptacles around the room and so this is a good continuation from that video again it's called how to wire a room if you want to check it out it's me wiring this whole room if you have any questions or comments about this video be sure to leave them in the comment section below and i'll get to them as soon as possible and any of the products used in this video could be found in my amazon store the link is in the description below and again i wanted to say thanks a lot for watching my name's josh be sure to subscribe ring that bell so you get notification every time release new video and hammer that like button if you found value in this video all right i got a lot of wiring to do yet so i better get started i'll see you in the next video have a good one

Channel: The Excellent Laborer

Views: 13,474

Rating: 4.9279871 out of 5

Keywords: how to wire a light switch, light switch, wiring a light switch, how to, light switch wiring, how to wire a light, how to replace a light switch, how to install a light switch, switch, how to wire a light switch with 3 wires, how to wire a double light switch, how to wire a single pole light switch, wire a switch, how to wire a switch, how to change a light switch, two way light switch wiring, light, light switch wiring diagram, wire a light switch, how to wire, electrical

Id: 7zl2c_b-Ntk

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021